The Fairy-Land of Science eBook

like the snowdrop in the garden of to-day, they caught
the sunbeams and worked them into their leaves.
Then the plants died and were buried deep in the
earth and the sunbeams with them; and like the gnomes
they lay imprisoned till the coals were dug out by
the miners, and brought to your grate; and just now
you yourself took hold of the fairy wand which was
to release them. You struck a match, and its
atoms clashing with atoms of oxygen in the air, set
the invisible fairies “heat” and “chemical
attraction” to work, and they were soon busy
within the wood and the coals causing their atoms
too to clash; and the sunbeams, so long imprisoned,
leapt into flame. Then you spread out your hands
and cried, “Oh, how nice and warm!” and
little thought that you were warming yourself with
the sunbeams of ages and ages ago.

This is no fancy tale; it is literally true, as we
shall see in Lecture VIII, that the warmth of a coal
fire could not exist if the plants of long ago had
not used the sunbeams to make their leaves, holding
them ready to give up their warmth again whenever
those crushed leaves are consumed.

Now, do you believe in, and care for, my fairy-land?
Can you see in your imagination fairy ‘Cohesion’
ever ready to lock atoms together when they draw very
near to each other: or fairy ‘Gravitation’
dragging rain-drops down to the earth: or the
fairy of ‘Crystallization’ building up
the snow-flakes in the clouds? Can you picture
tiny sunbeam-waves of light and heat travelling from
the sun to the earth? Do you care to know how
another strange fairy, ‘Electricity,’
flings the lightning across the sky and causes the
rumbling thunder? Would you like to learn how
the sun makes pictures of the world on which he shines,
so that we can carry about with us photographs or
sun-pictures of all the beautiful scenery of the earth?
And have you any curiosity about ‘Chemical
action,’ which works such wonders in air, and
land, and sea? If you have any wish to know
and make friends of these invisible forces, the next
question is

How are you to enter the fairy-land of science?

There is but one way. Like the knight or peasant
in the fairy tales, you must open you eyes.
There is no lack of objects, everything around you
will tell some history if touched with the fairy wand
of imagination. I have often thought, when seeing
some sickly child drawn along the street, lying on
its back while other children romp and play, how much
happiness might be given to sick children at home
or in hospitals, if only they were told the stories
which lie hidden in the things around them. They
need not even move from their beds, for sunbeams can
fall on them there, and in a sunbeam there are stories
enough to occupy a month. The fire in the grate,
the lamp by the bedside, the water in the tumbler,
the fly on the ceiling above, the flower in the vase
on the table, anything, everything, has its history,
and can reveal to us nature’s invisible fairies.